PC Memoirs

After the recent negative headlines that Facebook received, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit the whole issue of social networking: is it good or bad?

Some people love Facebook and some despise it. I am somewhere inbetween, as I recognise the good things and positive potential of Facebook and similar sites, but on the other hand, I think people spend too much time and energy on this type of networking. There are many reasons for hating Facebook, which I’ll attempt to list.

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I just read an article in a newspaper that mentioned some funny domain names on the Internet. Then I remembered - I have heard a fair share of weird and funny Web addresses in my 12 years online (yes, I entered the virtual world in 1998). Some are well known, such as expertsexchange.com, and others not so much (and for a good reason).

So I thought, why not list some of these names for our amusement. Most of the names you will see in the following list look innocent at first, but if you read it differently, it may sound both funny and often naughty! Please be aware that some of the domain names don’t exist any more, as the owners have identified the unfortunate word associations and corrected their mistake.

Here is my selection of BAD DOMAIN NAMES (I’m sure there are plenty more):

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You may have read my post about Handy Backup last year. Handy Backup is an award winning backup data backup and synchronization software for home and small to medium business environments. It is designed for Microsoft Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000 and 2008/2003 Servers. With this program, you can save all your important files, settings and even Windows registry to your hard drive or some removable medium, such as external hard drive or DVD. 

Handy Backup was created by Novosoft LLC, and there are three versions of the software: the Basic edition, the Professional and Enterprise edition. The basic edition is perfect for home users and, I might add, very important as well. A backup software such as this is essential for home users, who don’t have the luxury of expensive firewalls and backup servers to protect their data against loss or damage. Everyone should have backup software installed on their computer.

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My friend Mitch came by today with a really bad computer problem. His Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop wouldn’t start and the screen was completely blank. I suggested that we try to load it in Safe Mode, but that didn’t help. When I pressed F8, the screen was still blank. All I could see was the Dell logo, then everything disappeared. Nothing I tried worked. I could get into BIOS, but none of the options solved the problem (for example Load defaults).

After a while and several attempts to load Windows Vista, I got to the Windows Repair and Recovery options menu. The repair option failed, and diagnostic tests showed that the hard drive had some errors, so there was no way that Windows would start normally. However, Mitch had hundreds of photos on the disk and no backup. Obviously he wanted to recover those.

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It’s been more than 5 years since Youtube was founded and more than 3 years since Google bought the popular video sharing Web site.

Youtube started modestly, like many Internet sensations, but it has grown so much that now visitors watch more than 2 billion videos a day! I bet US television networks wished they had that kind of audience in prime time

YouTube was founded in February 2005 by then PayPal co-workers Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Google bought the online video-sharing service less than 2 years later for $US1.65bn and turned it into a money-making machine by broadcasting everything from backyard videos to independent films.

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